The results of research using false-belief tasks have been fairly consistent: most normally-developing children are unable to pass the tasks until around the age of three or four. The conclusion from this research has thus been that most children do not begin to have any mature theory of mind abilities until this time.

2. Tomasello:

Apes communicate with conspecifics most flexibly in the gestural domain, including adapting to the attentional state of the recipient. They use both intention movements (abbreviations of social actions that become communicative within a specific interactive context) and attention getters (actions that gain the attention of others to the self in a wide variety of contexts). [..] They are also all basically “competitive” – aimed at getting the signaler what she wants – not co-operative in the sense of sharing psychological states. Interestingly, when interacting with humans many apes do learn to “point” to things they want triadically. But these “points” are action imperatives only; they are not co-operative in the human sense (and may not even be truly referential), as evidenced by the fact that these pointing apes still do not understand when humans point for them informatively.

3. The idea (as I understand it) is that the specific setup of dendrites (e.g. how far the locations where other neurons synapse onto them are removed from the cell body) seems to have an influence on the computations that go on within our brain, but that we do not have a good theory of how specifically such a dendritic setup is useful, in contrast to other possible strategies of surface enlargement.

4. Do you know any animals that would die for the idea of justice?

1. “Children below the age of four do not have a concept of what other people know. [...]”

My experiences with my sister (2 years) seem to contradict this statement: She is perfectly able to recognize what she knows and what others know. If you read some book to her she often gets suck of this activity, because she recognizes that there is something about the book (so words) that she cannot understand (so read). We made this finding in many other situations as well: When somebody plays the xylophone she takes away the thing with which you generate the music on the xylophone, not because she wants to play now (as many children do when observing others with their belongings), no, she takes it and put it down on the table as if she wanted to say: “I don’t want you to play, because I cannot either.” We’ve observed that in many different occasions. Very interesting. i

2. “Apes seem to understand basic intentions, but not cooperative intentions.”

What do you mean by “cooperative intentions”? This statement somehow struggles with my intuitions.

3. “We know no good reasons why neurons have dendritic trees beyond increasing the surface area for synapses from other neurons.”

I don’t understand why this should not be a good reason for existence…If there are hundreds of synapses but there is no place for them to dock to it should be worth having enough surface.

4. “We are the only species vulnerable to ideas. Think religion. Freedom. Democracy. Justice.”

Well…let’s not quarrel much about this, but justice? I guess there are lots of examples for justice in the animal kingdom, aren’t there?